Marvel Epic Collection: Thor - War of the Pantheons
Tom DeFalco, Roger Stern (scripts)Ron Frenz (art)Marvel Comics, 2013 That Marvel Comics' new "Epic Collection" line of paperback reprints should bump a volume starring their Norse god/superhero Thor to the front of the release schedule only makes sense: the character is currently appearing in Marvel Studio's latest billion-grossing movie, Thor: The Dark World, so the studio's comic-book arm (gone are the days when that order was reversed) has every incentive to flood the marketplace with reprints from Thor's half-century of appearances in comic books.This is very good news for long-time Thor fans whose old stapled copies of individual issues have grown ragged and brittle with the decades; a well-made hardcover omnibus edition of those old issue can be read and re-read with a merry absence of guilt or delicacy - as can paperback reprint volumes like this new "Epic Collection," which restores issues from the late 1980s (hence the ill-chosen cover, featuring Thor and a bunch of people who only those long-time fans will recognize as a long-defunct and particularly pathetic line-up of Marvel's other billion-dollar franchise, the Avengers) written by Tom DeFalco and Roger Stern and drawn throughout by Ron Frenz and a variety of inkers.It's an oddly engaging run (and it's twice as long as the stretch of issues reprinted here - we can only hope there's another Thor "Epic Collection" or two in the works), mainly due to DeFalco's energetic writing and frequent recourse to bombast-deflating humor. His Thor is a true-blue virtuous simpleton in the manner of Stan Lee at his peak with the character (very unlike the grim grog-gulper currently starring in the comics): he fights, he yells that he shall never give in to despair, then he fights some more. The over-arching plot running through these issues is a war launched by Seth, the Egyptian god of death, against the power of Asgard, home of the norse gods, and DeFalco allows that main course of action to digress into odd pockets and corners (the creation of a ridiculous trio of conflicted heroes called the Earth Force, for instance, or a twenty-page battle between a delirious Asgardian warrior and, of all people, the blind mortal superhero Daredevil), always sure of his ability to bring everything around to a suitably grand climax.The energy of the writing is matched on almost every page (there are one or two pieces of added filler by other hands, as is almost inevitable in a collection like this) by the artwork of Ron Frenz, whose signature style during this period of his career was ... the signature styles of others. Like Rich Buckler before him, in these pages he uses a dynamic page-layout all his own but fills it with actual artwork mostly traced from the panels of long-ago Thor artists such as Jack Kirby or John Buscema. Those long-time fans will be able to play a little memory-association game with all of this tracery, trying to pinpoint exactly where Frenz is finding his source material. It's an odd artistic strategy, no longer much in vogue (if it ever was), but Frenz pursues it with such vigor and imagination that only the purest of purists will begrudge it.At the current pace of Marvel's black-and-white "Essential" reprint series, it may be a year or two before these issues show up there, but fans shouldn't wait, nor should they deprive themselves of the generally excellent coloring job of Max Scheele in most of these issues. With this volume we inch a bit closer to having all of Thor in one modern, high-quality book-form or another - and we have lots of nostalgic fun along the way.
